The Moirae's Mirror - November

Hey y'all,

So I vaguely hinted at some kind of overhaul of FoA's mechanics when I updated this week, and suggested that you folks might get the longer version of how my thought process is going on that. 

So…yeah. My basic reasoning here is that FoA is starting to feel a little bloated as we move into the latter half of it. There's a lot of variables to consider, some of which haven't even come up on every playthrough. And that's good, I want to keep that! I want the game to be very responsive to the player's choices, and have loads of flavor text for different callbacks and things. 

The problem is, doing this on top of as many options as I have for things like personality, power spread, attitude towards various people, etc, etc, gets to be a lot. The problem is multiplicative. I've encountered additional problems in the outings I've been working on lately, because there's platonic, romantic, and maybe-maybe versions, and coupling this with the consideration that a PC might be aro or ace makes writing anything in a strong and clear way difficult, to say the least. 

So I've been looking at ways to streamline the number of complexities. It's very important to me that people are able to play their characters as aro, ace, demi, trans, nb, neurodivergent, and so on. I will not be removing any of those options. I also want them to be able to customize, and I have been trying to figure out for ages how to work in options for things like being fat or average in build instead of assumed thin or muscular. (The game doesn't assume anything, but as with many other things, silence can be telling, because society has assumed defaults, and even I find myself falling into certain traps with thinking around these things.)

The solution, to me, seems to be making the player set all the relevant things early on, when it comes to character creation, and 'locking' personality traits in over time. (For the purpose of things I write the PC doing.) Some chances might present themselves to act "unusually" for the character, and I won't lock off important choices based on personality alone, but having the basics down early will help me not have to fiddle around with too many wildly unlikely variations for consistency's sake, which will free me up to write more variations for what's there.

I will also probably be easing up on the sheer number of options available for most of the choices, and really focusing on what I want each of them to do for the narrative. CoG has this style where they tend to want really frequent choices that's got me used to one per… almost three paragraphs or so, and I think that's probably too many for a slower-moving story like FoA. There will still be plenty of them, but I want to be more intentional about them, and use the personality variables to make some of the smaller interactions flow without needing constant player input. 

What does this mean concretely? Well, the skills are probably staying as they are, though I will be using them for more. I think, for example, people inclined to physical skills just approach problem-solving differently from, say, those of an academic bent. I want to start using that to flavor things!

As for personality variables, I want to pick some that are likely to make a big difference in how the PC interacts with the world and others around them. Tentatively, the rebuilt set will be: calm/expressive, exacting/blithe, and intuitive/logical. There's an additional one specifically for the PC's general level of flirtiness—forward/reserved. I'm also planning a hidden one for the frequency with which the PC likes to take initiative/control in their physical encounters, if applicable, but that will probably only make things happen for some players, i.e., those that trend notably in one direction or another. That's a bit further off for me to worry about, though, and probably whether or not I use it will depend heavily on how involved the intimate scenes end up being. 

Anyhow, beyond that a few key things I plan to track: PC's initial opinions of Olympus, the Underworld, Demeter, and humans, all of which will have a fair bit of relevance as the story moves on. I might just set those values initially depending on the first time each comes up, then start tracking how many times the player chooses options that diverge from that initial view. That should allow me to give them 'arcs' in line with player choices. 

So currently, the plan is:

• Skills that can be increased, use for checks and also flavor. Potential 'benchmark' points that will influence other people's estimation of the PC; e.g. Hekate might nerd out with a high-erudition PC in a way she wouldn't with others.
  
• Personality variables that track for a while, then lock. After lock, there will be fewer, but not no, chances to 'play against type.' These variables will be used to flavor interactions that I write between the PC and others.
  
• Opinion variables, set early and then only 'tracked' in the sense that divergence is accounted for.
  
• A character creator first thing, which allows PC to set a wide range of characteristics, as well as their sexuality, gender (trans or cis), and pronouns. Some options will close things off (e.g. choosing to be monoamorous will lock poly content), while others will not (being aro doesn't mean you can't flirt or go for a sexual relationship with the allosexual characters).
  
• Other factors of interaction and variables that might occasionally come up (e.g. the acrophobia option) will show up organically in the story as before. 

It's sort of a lot as far as a rehaul goes, but actually making all of these things explicit means I can write more easily, using vaguer terms where I want to encompass everyone, but being able to get really specific where that seems like the better approach. My impression is that the downside of this is usually that detailed customization takes a long time and lots of clicks, but I think I can actually get all this done very quickly with the use of a Twine feature called cycling, which will allow for multiple selections over one or two pages, and bam, done. 

Still working on building my interface, but it feels like I'm learning pretty quickly; in just the last month or so I've moved entirely away from the Sugarcube defaults, and then away from other people's templates, and I'm working on a custom UI with what I think are some pretty neat features. The focus is going to be on the writing, always, of course, but I'm hoping the writing will at least look nicer than how it does in CS!

Anyway, that's where my head's at for the moment. Feedback is totally welcome, by the way. Game design is definitely something I'm still learning and working at, and I'm sure there's factors I've missed! It can't make FoA all things to all people, but I want to do a good job with what I've in fact taken on.